While Cuckoo endured this fate, Dr. Levillier was in a perplexity of another kind.  The first round of that battle had ended in apparent decisive defeat of Valentine’s accusers.  During the evening the fortunes of war had certainly wavered to the doctor’s side.  Julian had displayed sudden strong signs of an awakening; but the sitting had thrown him back into his dream, had pushed him more firmly beneath the yoke of his master.  The doctor did not understand why, although he recognized the fact; he could not divine the exact effect that disappointment would have upon sudden suspicious eagerness.  Julian had been waked to wonder, to observe Valentine for an instant with new eyes, to look the mystery of the great change in him in the face, and know it as a mystery.  Yes, he had even thought of Valentine as a stranger, and said to himself, “Where, then, is my friend?” The new Valentine had risen out of the ashes of sleep.  Julian pressed forward the sitting as a means, the only one, of searching among these ashes.  In the old days each sitting had quickened his senses into a strange life, as the last sitting quickened the senses of the doctor.  But to Julian this last sitting brought nothing but disappointment; the thing which had been alive was dead, and so the sudden hope which had come with the new wonder died too.  He supposed that he had been the prey of an absurd fancy created by the idle words of the doctor, or by an idiotic movement of his mind, which had cried to him on a sudden:  “If the Valentine you love and revere is really gone away, what are you worshipping now?” Now, in his heavy disappointment he thought of this cry as a mad exclamation, and he sought to drown all memory of it, and every memory in fresh vices, and in his fatal habit of absinthe-drinking.  He lay down under the yoke beneath which he had previously wept, and so succeeded in going still lower.  So that night Valentine had won his intended triumph, although for a while it had been in jeopardy.

Doctor Levillier was in perplexity; he had been brought to the very threshold of revelation, and then thrust back into an every-day world of thwarted hopes and broken ambitions.  But the memory of magic was still with him, and gave him a feeling of unrest, and a pertinacity that was not to be without reward forever.  Valentine’s triumph held for the conqueror a poison seed from which a flower was to spring.  The doctor’s determination to continue the fight was frustrated at this time by Julian, rather than by Valentine.  Julian’s disappointment plunged him in a deep sea of indifference, from which he declined to be rescued.  The doctor’s invitations to him remained unanswered.  If he called, Julian was never at home.  Several times the doctor met Valentine, who, with a deprecating smile, told him that Julian was away on some mad errand.

“I seldom see him now,” he even added upon one occasion.  “He has gone beyond me.  Julian is living so fast that my poor agility cannot keep pace with him.”